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The Old Year and the New
In which I reflect on 2021 and look forward to 2022
The Year Past
2021 was year of almosts. I did things that scared me, but I was definitely overall a huge bitch. I reached ~8000 pages (and counting) of Spanish reading, but am still only 50 pages into Cien Años de Soledad. I completed my GBO successfully (yes, one goal completely finished!). I wrote 23 blog posts, some of which were just copy-pastes of college essays. No band materialized, and I’ve had trouble even practicing guitar lately.
However, there were a lot of things that happened in 2021 that I didn’t plan for. I was caught up in a serious relationship for half of the year, maybe due to my slowly growing fashion sense . I became aware and worried about ecological collapse, and began taking more serious steps to reduce my carbon foot print, and become marginally self-sufficient. I moved in with two of my best friends. And I’ve lived some of the wild college life that I didn’t live at MIT.
What I did accomplish in 2021 looks like some weird, mostly orthogonal transformation of the goals that I wrote out at the beginning of the year. Also, I’m not sure this process of goal setting is actually healthy. Some of these goals were so explicit as to almost be making the goal the only end, rather than the process itself.