Portrait Of A Year Upcoming

I realize I mostly missed out on the resolution extravaganza! by waiting to post this list at the beginning of February vs. the beginning of January, but I wanted to make sure it was as accurate a reflection of my hopes and dreams for the year upcoming as I could make it. Which took a bit longer than originally anticipated.

That, and I’ve been a little busy (roller skating with old and new friends, and) making every inch of my body sore in celebration of three months dedicated to becoming a better, stronger, faster Kerri via Jennie’s BBL competition. And you guys, IT’S TOTALLY WORKING. Which is pretty dang exciting, and I can’t even tell you how fantastic this year is already for the simple fact that I’ve taken my body back and I can literally feel it (hurting, yes! and) getting stronger every single day. I mean, seriously. I just linked you to a full body shot of me, which is probably the first full body shot of me I’ve willingly linked to in…years? Since this one, maybe? And the first one I can remember actually being excited about in at least that long.

To say I’m incredibly psyched about 2011 is to grossly understate. Ready? Me, too.

——————-A YEAR COMPLETE: 2011————–

• Rock the GREs (Most likely later in the year, after my brain has been sufficiently replenished with the required amount of literary knowledge).

• Research graduate programs for English Literature/decide if I want to teach at the collegiate level when I grow up (As you probably noticed this goal goes pretty clearly hand-in-hand with rocking the GREs).

• I received some really great (and quite unexpected) feedback on my writing this past year. Personal letters from multiple editors about how far a certain piece made it in a contest and/or how they thought I should revamp a piece and resubmit it, and it was just the encouragement I needed to keep pushing myself forward with my work. So, to that end: Keep entering writing contests. Keep writing and polishing my stories.

• Get in the water with kayaks and paddles! Specifically: Kayak along the Columbia River during a full moon; Kayak along the Oregon Coast.

• Attend and survive my first ever! group fitness class. Done and done, and loved!

• Keep rocking The Bar Method until I’m as strong as I used to/want to be.

• I also really want to focus on my flexibility this year, and so with that: Stretch daily. No exceptions, no excuses.

• See Minneapolis for the first time in July, while visiting my sister (and her brand new, first ever baby!).

• Take a letterpress printing class.

• Rock my first ever outdoor boot camp in May. (A big thanks! to Sarah for saying “Do it! You’ll totally love it!” when I was trying to decide if I should buy the Groupon or let it sprint on by.)

• Get plugged in. I just want to be more present. With my friends, at work, at church, in my community. I want to pitch in and volunteer and get out and take notice of places where I might be able to help.

• Make Dance Dance Party Party! a regular Friday evening routine. This is happily already in the works, as I’ve been dancing my proverbial thighs off (with Erin and Hans!) for the past four weeks in a row.

• Decide if Roller Derby is right for me by attending various boot camp dates from January – May.

• Get back to Maui, possibly again for Labor Day weekend. (As my Original Maui Buddy is busy with wedding prep this year, the spot next to me on the plane is up for grabs! I promise to let you have the arm rest.)

• Move into an apartment or house where I’m paying less rent. (This is most likely going to happen toward the end of the year, unless something amazingly unexpected happens sooner than I can save for the move.)

• Bungee jump, here. (Bonus points for convincing someone to jump with me. Come on, you guys! You know you want to dive head first off a bridge at least once in your life.)

• Stay in Cannon Beach for a night (or a weekend) all by myself. (Iggy can come, too, I guess.)

• Take a Nia/Zumba class with Jen, Sizz and Terrell while I’m visiting Seattle one weekend.

• Plan and finish at least three scenic Pacific NW hikes. (This was something I never got to last year, that I really really want to make a priority this year.)

• Visit NYC for the first time.

• This past year I fell in love with trail running. I plan to keep running, and while I have intentions to finish the Shamrock Run (5k) March 13 (hopefully with Rhi and Kali again!), and the Columbia River Crossing (my first ever 10k), October 2, more than finishing races, I just want to keep running, and keep pushing myself distance-wise throughout the year.
  

• Maintain (and hopefully enjoy!) a pretty crazy monthly reading schedule. This is going to be way more intense than my two-books-a-month goal last year, and a bit more structured than I originally imagined, if only because if I really think I’m going to accomplish my aforementioned goal of rocking the GREs, I need to re-read (and read for the first time) the books on which I’m going to be tested. And hoo boy, has it been awhile since some of these books and I had some serious one-on-one time. So far, this is my plan of literary attack:

January: Poetry refreshers on Blake, Keats, Frost and Seamus Heaney

February: Jude the Obscure; David Copperfield; Matthew Arnold (esp Dover Beach); Shelley Refresher

March: Shakespeare refresher; Milton’s Paradise Lost; Catch-22; The Great Gatsby; Great Expectations refresher

April: The Iliad, The Odyssey and Ulysses refreshers; Dryden’s All for Love; Chaucer refresher; A.E. Housman and Walt Whitman refreshers; Gulliver’s Travels

May: Tolstoy and T.S. Eliot refreshers; Byron’s Don Juan; Pope’s An Essay on Criticism; Wuthering Heights; Orwell refresher

June: Melville, Faulkner, Hawthorne, Wilde and Hemingway refreshers; Dylan Thomas; Wordsworth refresher (especially Lyrical Ballads); Heart of Darkness

July: Joyce’s Dubliners; Native Son; Plath and Dickenson refreshers; Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

August: Doctor Faustus; Middlemarch; Woolf refresher; 17th Century British poets refresher (Marvell; Herbert; Herrick; Lovelace; Carew); Short fiction refresher

September: Dante’s Divine Comedy; The Faerie Queen; Walden; Oedipus Rex; A Modest Proposal

October: Tom Jones; Plato’s Republic; The Way of the World; Frankenstein; Dostoevsky refresher

November: Rock the test!

December: Read something ridiculous that takes absolutely zero brain power. I’m thinking a children’s ABC book. Or maybe a coloring book.

———————–C’EST FINIT!———————-

So that’s it! And of course that’s really just the beginning. This list, like the one before it, is merely a plank off of which I intend to walk (or perhaps maybe dive), a place where I can routinely check in with myself and keep pushing myself forward despite the aches and pains that always accompany personal and physical growth.

(For anyone wondering, 2010′s updated list is here.)