“My New Year’s Resolution is to finish this cigarette.”
We were sitting outside in the not-so-cold Seattle night, an hour into 2014 and five hours into the party. Bartenders and Amazon employees, law students and living-at-home job searchers. Forty of us, or some number near there, drinking and dancing and hooking up.
She finished the cigarette. 2014 was a success.
1) Play more bridge with my grandparents
My grandmother tells me that when playing bridge, you should only make two-thirds of your bids. Two-thirds of the time, you should win the hand and get closer to making game. One-third of the time, you should fail. Lose the hand; give points to the other team. Take a risk and blow it.
I’ve applied the same philosophy to skiing, among other things. If I don’t fall at least once, I’m not skiing hard enough. And I need a big crash—one that scares me and ends in a billow of snow, or one that sends me tumbling down a long slope that I knew was too steep. I need to get powder inside my goggles and down my shirt, and I need to hike back up to one or both of my skis, poke away the snow that packed itself onto bottoms of my boots, and struggle to jamb first my toe and then my heel in place before the ski slips down the hill.
2) Get published 3) Get a job, a vehicle, a place to live, and new shoes
My resolutions are not New Year’s Resolutions. In my circles, New Year’s Resolutions are not cool, or groovy, or fetch. My resolutions are just the goals that I make and revise throughout my life, and although some will overlap with 2014, they are not tied to it. Some of my resolutions—like getting published—are too big to fit into the span of one year. Others are too small. Finding a pair of leather oxblood shoes with a little bit of brouging does not need a full month, let alone a year.
4) Watch The Wolf of Wall Street, American Hustle, and Her 5) Find a church in Washington that makes me look forward to Sundays
My resolutions look more like a to-do-list, laced with introspective self-improvement and strong doses of new life experiences. It’s like a short-term and somewhat disappointing bucket list.
6) Join a climbing gym 7) Summit Mount Rainier without a guide 8) Date more women—some who will make my brother jealous 9) Go to more parties 10) Camp out for a three-day musical festival–the kind with hippies and psychedelics and naked people–the kind that two of my drivers recommended when I asked them: “If you could give me one piece of advice—about anything—what would it be?” 11) Omitted, because my grandmother reads this blog 12) Omitted, because my grandmother reads this blog 13) Read more—always read more
My resolutions are bricoleur. They are messy and vibrant and ambitious and mundane. It is a dirty, wrinkled list held together with Scotch tape, because this is the time for it. No wife and no kids; no mortgage or car payments. This is the time to follow another driver’s piece of advice—“Don’t own anything you have to feed or paint”—and the time to live cheap and free and risky. This is time to make only two-thirds of my bids.
NPR called Josh “a modern-day Jack Kerouac” after he wrote about his 7,000-mile, no-money hitchhiking journey through the United States. After hitchhiking, he found homes in the Pacific Northwest, the Episcopal Church, and the post calvin. He now helps authors introduce their books to the world as the marketing manager for HarperCollins Leadership, builds websites as the owner of Branded Look LLC, and makes trail maps as the owner of Where We’ve Been Trail Maps. Josh’s writing has appeared in places such as The Emerson Review, Front Porch Review, and Perspectives.
