New Year: Old Quotations

"I'm learnding!"

Ralph Wiggum

I figured I'd write a 'year-in-review' post. Last year defied all expectations, really. If, at the end of 2013, you'd said to me "next year, you're gonna meet a whole group of people separate from your current group, you're gonna crush on this super-cute girl and ask her out two days after you first lay eyes on her, you're gonna go to a whole bunch of sleepovers, you're gonna organise an outing to Sydney, you're gonna sing karaoke, you're gonna learn Dungeons and Dragons, and you're gonna actually start applying to venues so you can perform comedy", I would have laughed at you. Seriously: I would have stood there, chuckling to myself, going "oh, sure, I'm gonna meet people, and ask a girl out. You're fuckin' hilarious."

But it all happened. It all happened! That's insane, at least relatively speaking. It's not that I thought only some of those things would happen; it's that I thought none of them would happen. But nope: it all did. And that's great! It may not be the most exciting thing for anyone else my age, but fuck them; it's my life I'm worried about, not theirs :P  It wasn't a perfect year, but there's no such thing as a perfect year, and it's outshone every year prior to it in terms of achievements.



I'm not one for New Year's Resolutions, but if I could name three things right now that I wanna achieve this year, they'd be:

1. developing better eating habits and becoming a little healthier
2. performing comedy at least semi-regularly
3. scoring a date and/or screw

Get larger, get laughs, get laid :P  I dunno if I'll actually do any of that stuff, but after this year, it would be utterly foolish to say they definitely won't happen. The first two are certainly achievable through discipline and applied effort, whereas the third one is more luck-of-the-draw (anyone who says otherwise is a fucking liar :P).



The desire to change my eating habits has risen sharply, but the willpower required hasn't come about yet. Normal food just looks so... foul. It's daunting to think that most people eat meals on a daily basis where the ingredients list is 100% made up of things I've never eaten before. Like, sure, I could start small, one ingredient here, another there, but it'll still take ages for me to eat properly, and even longer for me to bulk up a bit.

That's the main reason I want to eat properly: to improve my looks. It'll definitely make it easier to socialise and travel, and those are huge benefits, but the leading immediate cause behind my desire to eat properly is so I can be normal-sized. I weighed myself the other day—I was, like, 49.7kg. That is tiny for a 21-year-old guy! Even other skinny guys are fatter than me. there are seven-year-olds with fatter arms than me. Dat's real skinny, yo. This is, of course, without mentioning the ever-worsening pimples on my face and upper-chest, which are becoming more noticeable and more painful (when I accidentally scratch them). And while I'm far from ugly, I wanna look healthier and more mature than I currently do. Changing my eating habits is literally the only way that will happen. I dunno how or where to start, but if a fat person can change their diet, I can too.

I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not, but the food/exercise thing is a lot more prevalent in my head. There's a morning exercise plan on reddit that I scabbed a while back, and I think it'd be good to put it into practice, even if I don't change my eating habits yet. I tried doing a push-up (not the easy kind where your knees are on the ground) and I can do them; I was surprised at that, but also quite pleased. So exercise isn't beyond me :)  I don't give a fuck about going to the gym, and I have no intention of reading every fucking label on every goddamned thing I eat :P, but there are vast improvements to be made. And out of diet and exercise, the latter is the easier one to initiate and maintain given I've at least done it before, having regularly walked to/from uni for quite a few years now.



The comedy goal is just a more serious version of a goal I've had for a while: get on stage more often. In addition to the five-minute bit I've been perfecting for a comedy competition that starts in mid-February, I also have a number of other bits I wanna try out. They're not individual jokes so much as they're 'chunks' of material that can only be performed as a whole—trying out individual bits online really isn't an option. And it's not just the stage time; it's the networking, the independence, the social side, and all the other things I won't even see coming. It's a lifestyle of sorts, I guess :)  I'm hoping I do well enough with the competition such that it'll give me a leg-up in the stand-up world, but if even if I do manage that, it's a long and hard road ahead if I wanna keep pursuing this line of work.



The romantic & sexual stuff obviously just carries over every year :P  Every now and then, I say to myself "I wonder if I'll still be single/a virgin one year from now". I suppose the answer has been 'yes' every time thus far :P  But hey, this could be the year! You never know. I'm certainly in a much better position now than I ever have been, given the vast increase in social activity on my part, as well as the acquired social skills.

I have to admit: the idea of having sex with someone is still a little scary, given the level of trust and intimacy involved. Like, most of me is totally gung-ho about it, but there's always that little bit of my brain that goes "uuuhhhh, so I wanna be naked? In front of a girl who's also naked? And I wanna touch her, and I want her to touch me? And I want us to play with each other's junk, eventually having my junk inside her junk? Oh jeez... shiver ...I hope she's okay with that." Being a 21-year-old virgin isn't too bad, even if I do get kinda sullen when I hear about people I know having sex, but being 21 and having almost no idea what sexual intimacy is like in any form can feel little daunting. No sense worrying about it—I'm more excited than worried :)—but yeah, only time will tell.



The usual background goals also apply as per usual (do well at uni, find a job, continue playing way too much Tetris for my own good), but those are the three I wanted to talk about, and the only three that would be of any interest to read about, really.