New Years 2015

I’m not going anywhere tonight. I’ve never been much of one for NYE, and my options for tonight included spend­ing lots of money I don’t have, or spend­ing at least an hour cross­ing town. As I’m not drink­ing at the moment, feel­ing kind of quiet and tired lately, and totally broke until Monday, I’m happy to stay in. My preferred NYE social options are either going to a pub with­in quick reach of home, or going to a friends house/​hosting them anyway. The prob­lem with London is that every­one is so spread out with long jour­ney times or awkward jour­neys if you’re not going via cent­ral, and trans­port is often such a horrible exper­i­ence on NYE that it can become a bit of a mission to do even that.

2015 was a depress­ing year in terms of current events, and on a person­al level was stress­ful and tiring. I felt like I was constantly work­ing hard at things to not much result or appre­ci­ation, and perhaps direct­ing my energy at the wrong places. In gener­al I feel like I’ve constantly worked at things to over­all achieve a Ralph Wiggum level of effect­ive­ness. I was constantly work­ing all hours at some­thing, and at some points work­ing two jobs, had some stress­ful family stuff happen and my health suffered- I was plagued with asthma, eczema, and a recur­ring nasty case of hives in the first half of the year (not helped by work­ing on a street that’s an air pollu­tion hotspot) and then came down with shingles this autumn. From Janu­ary I’m only study­ing for the next 6 months, and hope­fully will move to a better and more spacious room in a less stress­ful envir­on­ment in the next few weeks, which should improve matters.

I’ve never really been one for strin­gent or punish­ing resol­u­tions, I tend to make lists of things I actu­ally want to do.

2015 resol­u­tions
Here’s my resol­u­tions from last year- let’s see how well I did:

1) Get a better paid job- I did that and it wasn’t much fun, although my finan­cial situ­ation improved dramat­ic­ally. I then got a teach­er train­ing place in Septem­ber, which is paid. Unfor­tu­nately the money got delayed and I was unex­pec­tedly broke for most of the autumn, which will luck­ily be fixed this week.

2) Go abroad not for work and not to visit relat­ives– Done, I went to Paris, Denmark and Sweden, all on low budget trips where I had a good time and saw lots of things.

3) Take more photo­graphs- I took a lot of photo­graphs, but I’ve been really bad at scan­ning or edit­ing them

4) Do lots of sewing- I didn’t do this, because I had to take a few courses of Pred­nisone (Pred­nisone is the devil) for severe aller­gies, which makes your weight fluc­tu­ate quite dramat­ic­ally, so making clothes for myself seemed like a bad idea. I taught a lot of kids about sewing and textiles however.

5) Gener­ally do as many creat­ive things as possible I didn’t achieve this one, mainly because I was constantly work­ing and tired

6) Read at least 2 books a week, and remem­ber to write a review post of them more regu­larly Almost did this one, I read over 70 books, although I didn’t review them at the ime, check out the book review posts I’m schedul­ing this week

7) Motiv­ate myself to cook from scratch more often I cooked a lot more often once I moved, due to a much better kitchen, but not as often as I’d have liked due to lack of time, energy or motiv­a­tion

8) Move house- I did that, although the result wasn’t entirely satis­fact­ory, so I have to do that again next month

9) Actu­ally put a new zine out- I didn’t manage this

10) Watch more films- I didn’t watch that many films, but I did get through quite a lot of TV shows.

2016 resol­u­tions

I put some gener­al goals here for the weeks I had off while I was recov­er­ing from shingles. They all still hold for next year. While I’ve been off, I’ve not got out as much as I’d like, due to tired­ness and family commit­ments, but I have been cook­ing a lot more and done some crafts in that time and read a lot of books.

1) Make some new zines– it’s been too long since I’ve done that, and I’ve got sever­al half-finished ones and am tabling at a zine fair on the 30th of Janu­ary

2) Knit a cardigan– I’ve cast it on already and am wait­ing for the extra balls of wall to arrive in the post

3) Make a patch­work quilt– For the past 15 years I’ve had one on my bed that my nan made. It’s been fixed about 10 times already, but has finally disin­teg­rated. I have some offcuts of some of the origin­al fabrics, and some of my own in simil­ar colour schemes, so I’ve been making hexagons for a new quilt. I need 500 of them though to make a double quilt, and I have 20 sewn up, and a further 50 cut out, so it’s going to take me a while. Sewing hexagons is a good thing to do when watch­ing tv, because it doesn’t need a lot of atten­tion, the paper template inside the hexagon makes sure the edges are crisp and accur­ate

4) Move house– I like the area that I live in, but my room is tiny and cold, and without any stor­age space and it’s a stress­ful living envir­on­ment. I can leave next month and have the money to do so, so I will. I’m look­ing forward to having a big enough room that I can make nice and turn into some­where comfort­able and relax­ing to return to.

5) Work less, relax more– I worked too much and juggled too many things last year. I’ll focus on my course and having a better work-life balance and enjoy being healthy again

6) Use up my fabric stash– hope­fully if my weight stabil­ises again I can make myself some nice clothes from the fabric I have stock­piled. I don’t really have room to sew at the moment either.

7) Leave London and figure out where I want to go– I finish my course in the summer. I’ve nearly left London multiple times before for the usual reas­ons (and a lot of my friends have already left, scattered around the coun­try and abroad), but ended up stay­ing because I was offered jobs and I was broke and needed the money (living in London however is a major cause of being broke). This time I’ll be in a better finan­cial situ­ation. I still don’t know where I want to go yet though. I miss Brighton, but maybe that would be a step back­wards. I don’t know, I’ll figure it out when I’m near­er the time and apply­ing for jobs. I don’t really have any force driv­ing me to anywhere in partic­u­lar.

8) Try my best to always speak up when I think things are wrong– I do try, but some­times you feel like you’re not allowed to, or there’s social atmo­spheres where people are posi­tioned as above ques­tion. Acqui­es­cing never feels right though, and I guess I should just recon­cile myself to being the person who points out the elephant in the room.

9) Keep doing photo­graphy and get back into home b&w dev. I’ve got a lot of unscanned films and uned­ited digit­al photos wait­ing to go, espe­cially from my trip to Scand­inavia in the summer. I also got a new devel­op­ing tank for Christ­mas.

10) Keep doing my own creat­ive projects and collab­or­ate with friends I miss the collab­or­at­ive atmo­sphere of art college. I don’t know how much time I’ll have outside of school place­ments while I’m study­ing, but in the East­er holi­day and when I finish study­ing, I’ll hope­fully have the chance.

11) Have a more varied social life This year for quite a peri­od my social life kind of got limited to local gigs a lot of the time. It can be quite narrow, and it’s always the same people, and I don’t think that’s healthy.

12) Travel to see friends who have moved away, and arrange to see people I haven’t seen in too long There’s some great people I just don’t see enough of

12) Keep read­ing plenty of books And remem­ber to write reviews of them near­ish the time. No partic­u­lar numer­ic­al target set this time.

13) Visit some­where outside Europe once I finish study­ing I have only been to Europe and North Africa. Admit­tedly I’ve been to every coun­try in Europe now bar Norway, Malta, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, some of the ex-Yugoslavia ones and Albania, and I’ve been to a lot of places via work you would never typic­ally go as a tour­ist, but still, I’d like to see more of the world.