new year's resolutions

i have a confession to make. i am a personal improvement freak. i am seriously addicted to figuring out what i want to change about myself and then doing it. it's not that i am overly critical of myself (in fact, anyone who knows me would tell you, if anything, that i probably have too high of an opinion of myself). i just really enjoy making myself a better person, and trust me there is a lot of work to be done in that area. even i, as great as i am, am not perfect. shocking, i know. hahaha.

anyway, the point is that i just love making new year's resolutions, and most of the time i stick to them. i think the key is to not make resolutions that you are not completely sure you can keep. for instance, i think goals people make about losing a certain amount of weight or getting a boyfriend/girlfriend or "being a better person" just rely too much on a) outside factors and b) changing your personality or lifestyle in a way that may not be good or satisfying for you.

when i make my goals for the year, i spend a lot of time thinking about what is and is not working for me in my life, and what i feel that i can realistically accomplish. that means that i also have to think about whether i am able at the time to make certain changes. for example, if i were to say to myself, i want to make more money, that's great, but do i know how to do that? no, i do not. therefore, my goal might be, "spend x amount of time researching ways to make more money." then at the end of the year i can see where i am at and then reassess whether actually making more money is a realistic goal at that time.

here are some of my 2008 goals:

• commit myself fully to my life in cincinnati by developing close relationships to people here and making my job fulfilling to me and not overly stressful - check
• work through certain issues i was dealing with related to my parents' divorce - check
  
• call and visit my dad more often - check
  
• learn to make more of my grandma's lebanese recipes - check (well, i only learned hummus, but it still counts)
  
• travel no more than two weekends per month, three weekends per two month period, total - check

since my goal setting and accomplishing worked so well in 2008, i am being very ambitious in 2009. actually, i am a little worried that i have bitten off more than i can chew. my goals for 2009:

• stick to my budget (which i made, yay!)
  
• pay off $7k of my credit card debt
• pay off my car loan
  
• meet at least one new person each week
• call my mom, my dad, and my two sisters one time per month each
• visit michigan and illinois (where my family lives), or have people from there visit me, at least twice each
• do at least one volunteer project per month
• write on my own blogs (the food and debt blogs) at least once per week, and write on the cincinnati blog i write with my friend avani at least twice per month
• travel no more than two weekends per month, three weekends per two month period, total
• begin understanding and working on, and hopefully make substantial progress with, my most recently identified personal issue*

*my most recently identified personal issue = i am not good at knowing what i do and do not want, or what is or is not good for me, until well into something. i have noticed this most significantly in two areas: meeting people and making purchases. i am very impulsive in both of these areas. i will meet people and think i love them and then oops, i realize i don't really like them that much but by then they think we are best friends. on the flip side, i also sometimes decide i am not really interested in getting to know someone, only to find out they are really great later on and i just didn't give them a chance.

re: purchases, i will just decide i need something and buy it, and then only much later will i realize i made a bad choice and it is too late to change at that point for whatever reason. i need to work on understanding why i am bad at these early on decisions, and why my instincts are not good on these things, and hopefully then i can learn to change so that i am better at this.

i know this is a lot to take on this year, but i really think 2009 is going to be great even though i have a limited budget and a lot of work to do. yay for a new year!