In Which We Get A Second Crack At New Year, And Blue Takes Full Advantage

Since it's the first day of Chinese New Year, I thought I might as well take a look at how my (American) New Year's Goals have been holding up. For the record, here's what they were:

• Cooking school
• Cooking vacation (that is to say, "find some kind of cooking-themed vacation package, enroll, etc.")
• Yoga vacation (there is actually a place that does a combination cooking/yoga resort vacation, but... it's in Kerala)
• Meet more people interested in Ashtanga (either through a Meetup.com-type-place or by simply posting a sign on the wall of my yoga studio which reads "Ashtanga Students' Happy Hour, because classes are so quiet and no one ever talks and wouldn't it be fun if we all got to know each other?")
• Attend 5-year college reunion
• Go to at least one conference in my field
• See Arcadia at the Folger Theatre
• Take day trip to NYC and see a taping of The Daily Show
• Take day trip to NYC and see TMBG live (see, that's why that $50 AB&B gift certificate will come in handy)
• Enter the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest... every week
• Eat at The Grill From Ipanema (but not alone)
• Eat at Lauriol (ditto; see, I walk by both of these restaurants several times a week and I've always wanted to go in but never have)
• See the Richard Avedon Portraits of Power exhibit (is running through Jan. 25, so had better get moving)
• Start attending open-mic nights both to meet new people and to see if it's something I want/would be able to do
• And two "secret" goals

And here's what I did:

Cooking School

I signed up for two months of cooking classes at the Lebanese Taverna, but found out they weren't at all what I was looking for. Now I am looking at signing up for different cooking classes, but I am a little hesitant because I don't want to lay out money for something unless I am doing a considerable amount of actual cooking.

Ashtanga & Ashtanga Friends

My actual resolution (different from goals) to clean up my Ashtanga practice is working out well, thanks in part to a yoga intensive I took a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, I had to squander the opportunity to make new yoga friends at the yoga intensive because I had to leave before the party/mixer at the end (there was a work thing I had to do that evening).

Attending a Conference

Yeah, did this one too. I'm not going to comment on it too much because I want to keep my work life out of my blog. *_^

The New Yorker Caption Contest

Haven't won yet. Find it baffling that none of the finalists for the below entry used the (obvious) word "overturned," as in "I hate it when they overturn my verdicts."

Portraits of Power

Saw the exhibit on its last day. MOST AWESOME THING EVER. It really was an unbelievably fantastic exhibit. They made you wander through rooms and rooms until the last thing you saw, before you left, was the Obama portrait. I'd love to do a whole post on this but probably won't; let's just say that I love photography and portraiture and the whole thing really tripped my geek. I don't have a great facial recollection memory, especially for politicians (they all look alike), so it was interesting to stare at the faces and then look at the caption and realize "oh, that's George McGovern!"

And then, at the end, you got to get your own portrait taken in Avedon's style. That was icing on the cake. (Really want to post the portrait but am hesitant to put face on the blog. Will think about it.)


So... those are all the goals I've accomplished in one month. Well, those and one of the secret ones. (I was going to have the second secret goal accomplished today, but something else happened today that made me a little hesitant to spend the money, as the second secret goal is a buying goal.)

As for the rest: haven't eaten at the restaurants because I don't want to eat there alone; haven't planned the vacations or the college reunion trip or bought the tix for Arcadia because they're too far out in the future; haven't even looked at how one gets tickets for The Daily Show because... well, because I think I believe that goal is too impossible--or too complicated--ever to come true.

And haven't even set foot in an open-mic night. Although I keep singing in the shower.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Checking the "Conference" Box

Today I registered for a conference. I'm not sure if it's the best conference in the world (the seminars sound interesting, but the online reviews aren't great), but there ought to be at least one or two solid takeaways I can bring back to my job. So cross your fingers that my first dip into the world of professional development turns out well!

I also... um... had six inches cut off of my hair. At least six. I hadn't planned on doing it, but I had just signed up for cooking classes and registered for this conference and gotten new adjustments in my yoga class and I was running around the office managing an event this afternoon and at one point I saw how disheveled I looked, with my eighteen-odd inches of hair shoved out of my face by two bobby pins, and I thought "this is not the image of success I want to portray."

And yes, it is completely lame that I actually thought the phrase "image of success," but I went out immediately after work and asked one of Dupont Circle's nice young gay salon artists to please make me over, and he did.

I guess that's what writing out New Year's goals will do to you. (I wonder what crazy thing I will do next?)

Happy Blue Year, Part IV: Goals

Last year, I wrote out a New Year's dream: to sing at an open-mic night. Didn't do it. (To be fair, I spent half of the year living in a town that didn't have open-mic night.) I think part of it was because my language was too vague; it was a dream that I wanted to do but didn't really take seriously.

So this morning, in the spirit of my "getting out there," etc., I wrote out a series of goals. These are different from resolutions because they are not necessarily mandatory; I resolve to clean up my Ashtanga practice because if I don't, I won't progress and I might even hurt myself again. But goals seem a bit more concrete than dreams, without the feeling of having "broken" them if I don't manage to achieve them all.

The first goal I wrote out was "cooking school" and you will be happy to know that in under an hour's time I had located and enrolled in monthly Middle Eastern cooking classes at the Lebanese Taverna. Already I feel like I have accomplished something!

Here are the others:

• Cooking vacation (that is to say, "find some kind of cooking-themed vacation package, enroll, etc.")
• Yoga vacation (there is actually a place that does a combination cooking/yoga resort vacation, but... it's in Kerala)
• Meet more people interested in Ashtanga (either through a Meetup.com-type-place or by simply posting a sign on the wall of my yoga studio which reads "Ashtanga Students' Happy Hour, because classes are so quiet and no one ever talks and wouldn't it be fun if we all got to know each other?")
• Attend 5-year college reunion
• Go to at least one conference in my field
• See Arcadia at the Folger Theatre
• Take day trip to NYC and see a taping of The Daily Show
• Take day trip to NYC and see TMBG live (see, that's why that $50 AB&B gift certificate will come in handy)
• Enter the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest... every week
• Eat at The Grill From Ipanema (but not alone)
• Eat at Lauriol (ditto; see, I walk by both of these restaurants several times a week and I've always wanted to go in but never have)
• See the Richard Avedon Portraits of Power exhibit (is running through Jan. 25, so had better get moving)
• Start attending open-mic nights both to meet new people and to see if it's something I want/would be able to do

... and two more which are secrets.

What's interesting is how many of these goals are ridiculously achievable. What's stopped me before from doing these kinds of things was a misplaced sense of frugality, which in retrospect I took a little too far (trying to save $15 by not going to SPX was idiotic). But I have my little nest egg tucked away and so it is about time to start exploring the city a little more.

And I've already enrolled in cooking classes! Woo-hoo!

Happy Blue Year, Part III: Indebleu

So last night I went to Indebleu, to a "mixer" for people in the DC area who had registered with AirBed and Breakfast. (AB&B is a place where people, literally, rent out their airbeds or spare rooms to travelers who want a cheap place to stay. In DC, it's specializing in inauguration rentals. Would much recommend over, say, Craigslist; I posted an inauguration rental on AB&B and it got rented within the week.)

I was a little disappointed -- with Indebleu, not with AB&B. If you go ahead and click on the Indebleu link you'll see what I thought the place would be like; but when I got there it was just a bar, and instead of playing the jazz-mood-music they play on the website, they had several giant televisions, all tuned to The King of Queens.

In short, I was overdressed.

The AB&B hosts were great; they had goody bags for everyone with a toothbrush and toothpaste and a $50 gift certificate if we ever wanted to stay somewhere. (Which I do. But that is another post for another time.) I was kind of more excited about the toothbrush than I was about anything else that happened that evening; as a mixer it was 95% female and we spent a lot of time standing around trying to make conversation, but getting a free toothbrush was pretty awesome, especially because that very afternoon I had accidentally dropped my old toothbrush behind the toilet.

So there you go. But I put myself "out there," as it were, and that's a start.

Now I'm going to go brush my teeth!

Happy Blue Year, Part II: Resolutions

All right. So my first resolution is pretty easy. I need to clean up my yoga practice. It didn't get sloppy while I was doing the modified practice (I had pulled a rib muscle and my teacher put me on some modified asanas); it got sloppy afterwards, when I began to catch myself doing things that were sort-of-halfway between "modified" and "full."

This essentially means I need to focus my attention a little more on what I'm doing, and start going to class more often!

My second resolution is to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that I get invited to a NYE party next year. This means that I need to put myself out there and start meeting new people. (I am not, necessarily, very good at this.)

Happy Blue Year, Part I

Sorry I didn't do a New Year's post... spent most of NYE filled with gloom and doom and did not want to add that to teh blogosphere.

Why gloom and doom?

I wasn't invited to a single NYE party.

Part of it, I know, was because nearly everyone I knew took off for vacation last week, and no one was really keeping track of who was in the city when, and nothing got organized.

But then I met a group of friends for a New Year's Day brunch, fresh back from their vacations, and they were all talking about the parties they had been to in DC.

And I got pretty gloomy because no one had asked me to go anywhere. (At one point, I had even tried to invite myself to a party and it didn't work out.)

And yes, you can say "then why didn't you throw the party and invite them?" and it comes back to "well, everyone was on vacation last week..."

So there you go.