Year of Failure, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying, and Love (the) Bomb(ing)

Dr Strangelove. Photograph: The Ronald Grant Archive

Well, then.

:blows dust off of this corner of the internet:

Five-ish years seems like a good amount of time to let the old blog lie fallow. Time to overturn the cold, crusty, neglected bit of land and see what's been composting under here.

As is my wont, I've entered into the "grace period" of my New Year's Resolution (NYR) process. Most folks either make resolutions, or obstinately refuse to do so. My middle-ground compromise is to allow for a two-week period of introspection leading up to the week-long bacchanalia of my birth-week, followed by a delayed NYR declaration.

One NYR that is already pretty firm is to resume posting to this blog. I've changed the concept from "a la Minna" to "Year of Failure" for both obvious and self-indulgently more obscure reasons.

It became rather quickly apparent that while I can draw to some degree, I really don't enjoy it. So... that sort of stopped happening before it really started. Over the years as momentum and entropy froze this blog into place, another thing became more and more apparent: I hate to fail.

I hate to fail so much that I don't do... anything.

Early on in life, some things came very easily to me. I was not a child prodigy at any one thing like many of my contemporaries (someday, I'll need to explore this whole "growing up Chinese American in the Midwest" thing more thoroughly, when the Abyss maybe doesn't stare back quite so pointedly) but things weren't necessarily all that difficult, either.

And so I was fairly proficient at many things - Jill of All Trades, Mistress of None. And I was OK with that.

In fact, I've drifted through most of my life being Generally OK with Things. Sure, there's been friction and pointy bits, and maybe a wee pinch of conflict here and there, but nothing earth-shattering. Nothing that would force significant change or growth. Then 2016 happened.

Holy shit, y'all.

Plenty of folks have processed all the WTF that went down in 2016 on a global scale (my favorite is Charlie Brooker's 2016 Wipe, which I highly, highly recommend. It will make you feel bad, and then it will make you feel better. Sort of all at the same time.). More locally, I had to deal with a metric ton of WTF at work. The scope, depth, breadth, and complicated stench of all the shit that went down was such that I ended up developing a fairly rigorous list of coping mechanisms just to be able to sleep at night:

• ASMR videos (which I had already been doing since 2013 when This American Life introduced me to the concept, but which became a near crutch in 2016)
• Binaural Beats videos (similar to ASMR, but more wahwahwahwah-y? See also solfeggio frequencies. <-- this link actually debunks SF's, but I still zone out to them - I'm OK with not having my DNA repaired.)
• regular yoga practice (heyo!)
• acupuncture (thanks to POCA, which is my favorite acronym of 2016)

So yeah. I didn't try to do anything and stuff still went South. So... why not venture forth instead?

I've been sitting on this draft for a few days now, and in that time I've released my motto for 2017. For the record, 2015 was "You Do You" and 2016 was "You Do the Best You". 2017 is gonna be "Disconnect, then Reconnect". Basically I'm focusing on turning it off and then on again.

To that end, one of the things I'm resetting is this blog. I intend to use "Year of Failure" to document all the things I'm going to try this year - things that I keep meaning to do, but don't. Things are outside of my comfort zone. Things at which I will most likely suck. But I'm going to do them anyway. And then I'm going to write about it on this blog. Could be the first thing I fail at is blogging. But I should maybe at least try first.

So here we go in three.... two.... one.... *bzzt*.