Goals of Birthdays Past

Way back in the day, I posted my goals for the year (my birth year, not the calendar year), and I couldn’t find my goals from the previous year to do a recap of those accomplishments. At long last, the list is located. Here are the goals I detailed in 2010-2011: 25 things to do before I turned 27.

1.      Participate in NaNoWriMo

2.      Submit novel to Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest

3.      Finish The Neverending Quilt by August 2011

4.      Write weekly*

5.      Learn some Korean

6.      Keep running/belly dancing

7.      Take a creative class

8.      Finish Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell by Susannah Clarke

9.      Get paid for something I wrote/made*

10.   Find a wedding dress by Thanksgiving*

11.   Get married*

12.   Move*

13.   Pay off one of my student loans*

14.   Consolidate other loans

15.   See Terri again*

16.   Get my tattoo

17.   Make socks for myself

18.   Learn to tango*

19.   Make sushi

20.   Make wedding invitations*

21.   Run 10 miles at once

22.   Have a tea party, with my new tea set, in our new apartment

The items with an * are the ones I completed that year. All in all, kind of a terrible year for my goals percentage-wise, with the added awful bonus of being an incomplete list.

That said, some of these items were really big accomplishments. Gettingmarried was a BFD, of course, as I’ve mentioned here once or twice before. I cheated a little by including wedding-related goals on the list, but I figured I was entitled, what with all the work that goes into such a shindig. Nearly 50 percent of my accomplished goals were specifically wedding-related. (Learning to tango was the fourth one, not paying off the loan.)

Seeing my friend Terri again happened at the wedding, too, though I wasn’t sure at the time that it would. We had last seen each other when we were about 7 and her family moved back to South Korea. We wrote letters back and forth as kids, which became e-mails back and forth, then eventually Facebook. Through all this time, we kept saying someday, we would see each other again. When she started school in the States, we knew it was only a matter of time, and she was able to come to our wedding, where we saw each other again for the first time in about 20 years. We laughed, we cried, it was beautiful.

(Sounds like a Lifetime movie, doesn’t it? Except with less murder. I like that.)

Thanks to this blog, I got into the habit of writing not only weekly, but almost daily. I sold a shawl to a friend, marking the first thing I’ve created and been paid for. And there was, of course, the moving.

Now for the things I didn’t accomplish.

Many of the goals I didn’t achieve were money-related. Considering how long Spousal Unit and I were out of work, I’ll give myself a pass on the tattoo, the class, the tea party, and the sushi. Not consolidating my loans made sense, too, due to their interest percentages.

The novel goals fell by the wayside due to wedding planning. But the other goals? Mostly, I was just lazy and unfocused, with the craziness of marriage and moving cross-country. And I didn’t have easy access to my list, which decided to lose itself in the move.

(The Neverending Quilt is in its own category - I think no matter what I do, it will take me at least an eternity to finish.)

I’ve done much better on my list so far this year (which actually has 25 goals). I can see myself completing at least 15 of those goals for certain by October, and hopefully more. It helps that I made the list more reasonable this year, and that I’m not planning to move before then.

Being that I’ve already completed seven of my goals, I think I’m well on track.