in which I make resolutions

What would the new year be without any resolutions? I feel like I always resolve to do the following:

-lose weight
-learn to love myself

and that I generally succeed to some degree, but never to that which I had intended. So let's try this again. 2011, you were a pretty fantastic year. I taught my first classes, left an elusive note in front of a beautiful stranger at a coffeehouse and subsequently began a relationship with said beautiful stranger. I ceased my previous gym mania and began to grow slightly more comfortable with my body. But let's see if we can do even better this year.

1. Be comfortable in my own skin.
I feel like this desire is what lies at the bottom of my preoccupation with creating outfits and putting them on display on this blog. If I like what I wear, I believe that I will learn to like how I look, and as a result be more confident in general. I should go to the gym--but not obsessively. I enjoy a good solid run with my desperate-sounding angsty music from early high school. When I work out regularly, I tend to stress out much less about school and about my personal life. I want to strive to make these the reasons that I go to the gym on a weeknight--not because I ate at Chipotle the afternoon before or because I watched (500) Days of Summer and got depressed because I don't look like Zooey Deschanel.

2. Keep in touch with far-flung friends.
An inevitable side effect of going to graduate school far from both my hometown and the town where I went to college has been that I don't live near any of my old friends. These friends are scattered throughout the country, at graduate school in Ohio, Georgia, and Virginia, or working jobs in Arkansas, Utah, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Furthermore, when I was in high school I did quite a bit of Harry Potter roleplaying online. Through this I met some amazing folks online, and some of us have kept in close touch--but, again, we do not live anywhere near each other! So, this year, I want to take the time to write letters, make phone calls, have Skype dates, exchange emails, with the wonderful people in all of these states (and others I haven't listed!) who have supported me... some for over a decade.

3. Read more.
I don't read enough. Don't argue with me. If I spent less time on Facebook, less time watching things on Netflix, I could be reading critical articles and nonfiction books and even--gasp!--novels that are unrelated to my classes. End of story.

4. Save money.
In order to have the freedom to spend the summer wherever I'd like, I need to be scrupulous with my earnings. I want to have the ability to both maintain my current lodgings in Iowa and travel.

R and I rang in the new year at a jazz bar downtown. Funnily enough, the bar is nextdoor to the building where my dad used to work; he told us that he sometimes went to that bar after work in the 1980s. So, to rephrase: R and I rang in the new year at a jazz bar that my dad used to go to. Jazz, a German white beer (well, three of them), and my delightful boyfriend. I received my midnight kiss. It was lovely.

I now have less than two weeks left in warm, sunny Austin. I'm starting to make a list of the places I want to eat, shop, and visit before I leave. I'm in no hurry to return to the cold, but it is time to start looking at revising my syllabus and rearranging my life for the new semester.





sweater: Coldwater Creek, very old
dress: thrifted vintage
tights: Sock Dreams
boots: gifted, old