Over on the lines forum, I snagged the opportunity to be the one who started the yearly goals thread. (Actually, I was hoping that one of the previous posters would have started it, but then suddenly it was almost the new year and the thread had still not started.) I really appreciated these threads over the past couple years. Slightly uncharacteristically, my contribution, which I just wrote today, has very little in the way of specific achievements I'm in pursuit of. Anyway, the purpose of this post is to riff on what I wrote there. (By the way, if you're reading this and would like an invitation to join the conversation, please feel invited to sign up and chime in.)

How was 2024 for you?

In my reply to the thread, I gave an answer for how 2024 felt. Here's how it shook out in terms of Things Done.

I spoke at the Joint Math Meetings in January in San Francisco. It was my first time visiting the city, and I was pleased with myself for skipping an entire day of the conference in order to do things like: meet Will Pragnell and RGB in meatspace, walk around the Mission neighborhood in a (failed) search for a compelling thrift store and a successful search for a bookstore, where I bought a bell hooks book (The Will to Change) which I read in August and a Thich Nhat Hanh book (Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers), which I read a week or two later while doing jury duty.

In late January I led a workshop on VCV Rack with Dani Derks and performed on a bill with them and A. Campbell Payne, both in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Spoke in seminars at CUNY, Temple, McGill and SUNY Buffalo, and an AMS meeting in Albany. Spent a week with a SQuaRE at AIM in Pasadena. Broke my streak (since September 2023) of doing a Celtic cross tarot spread every day in February. Had two fairly short relationships. Visited Georgia (the country) with two of my siblings, where I was a worse sport than I intended to be—I was caught off-guard by the common practice in Georgian churches and monasteries for women to cover their hair (and occasionally don a skirt) and men to remove any hat they had on. Georgia, it turns out, is positively littered with monasteries, and all of them poked at my gender in a place that I hadn’t fully realized I was vulnerable.

Spent 12 weeks attending The Recurse Center. Realized partway through doing it that I was transitioning again. Wrote many tens of thousands of lines of code, much of it for Seamstress, most of which didn’t stick yet. Performed twice with Janie Jaffe, once with LiveCodeNYC and once at VJoltron. Worked on music for a new play which the cast and I ultimately decided not to move forward with. Read at least 15 books. Hit the ArXiv with new papers four times, all of them collaborations. Completed Advent of Code (for 2022) in Rust and (for 2024) in Zig.

What would you like to accomplish?

I have a bunch of longer-term goals that I’d like to continue working towards, but I’m not particularly bothered on whether I finish them this year. Indeed, it would not surprise me if I abandoned them or worked on something different; that’s pretty par for the course. Having the goals and attempting to strive for them usually helps me work out what I should really be doing. Here are three.

• I’d like to write Album #2 as Alanza, tentatively titled Moire.
• I’d like to write a book. The shape of book has kind of been slippery, but I think it is probably mathematical at least a little.
• I’d like to get Seamstress closer to my original vision for version 2.

Most of what I’m interested in working on is a bit more process-oriented. In September I happened to make a list of things I’d like to be doing daily, weekly and monthly. At the time I was pretty struck by how many things I wanted to be doing every day. It seemed to me then that it would be pretty challenging to keep up with all of them. This was useful! It let me allow myself to fail to actually do everything I would like to do daily daily without needing to therefore give up the intention to do them daily.

Daily:

• Physical:
  • Tooth care (brushing 2x, flossing 1x, mouthwash)
    Do you have a kind of Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs, except it’s a list of habits that being able to maintain signal to yourself that you’re in a good place? For longer than I care to admit, flossing has been at the phase transition from “surviving” to “thriving” for me.
  • Pushups
    Without getting too intensely personal, it’s been interesting navigating a changing body along with changing desires for living in that body. I’m happy that gender shifts have brought me back up to my longtime plateau for body satisfaction. On the balance I’d like to see what it’s like to have slightly more muscle definition, particularly in my chest. Somehow it’s hard to own up to that? Which probably helps me understand why I haven’t followed this one through much at all. I think in September I could do maybe 5 really good pushups at once. I don’t think I’ve progressed significantly since.
  • Tidy my room
    Think “make your bed” level cleaning; the kind of thing that you can knock out on autopilot when waking up. I’m pretty good at managing to clean when it becomes obviously necessary, but historically less good at maintaining cleanliness.
  • Chores
    My responsibilities currently include processing dishes through the dishwasher and sweeping the main level (important, since my brother whom I live with carves wood).
• Mental / Creative:
  • 日本語を練習
    I have a subscription to a language-learning app, but haven’t managed to use it nearly as much as I should. I think I’d like to visit Japan this year (maybe in the summer?) if I can. But really, it would be nice to be closer to being able to consume Japanese culture and media in Japanese. I have been watching anime more frequently, (it’s a good thing—I’m in general quite bad at TV and movies, but enjoy good art) which is not nothing on this front.
  • Read I managed at least 15 books last year, but ideally would like to reactivate the part of myself that read voraciously as a child. I have a decently long train commute many days of the week, which is a perfect opportunity to read a book rather than rotting on my phone.
  • Write In addition to being a professional writer (of academic math) I am interested in writing creatively, blogging, etc.
  • Music At my most recent peak of music-making in 2022, I was in the habit of finishing work for the day and opening up Ableton or firing up a synthesizer to play with. I observed to myself once that when I go too long without playing an instrument, something inside me knots up.
• Spiritual:
  • Journal
  • Meditate
  • Throw tarot

Weekly:

• Cleaning (my room, the bathroom, other parts of the apartment)
• Cooking
  My brother and I alternate days we’re responsible for dinner. In an attempt to Solve Breakfast in 2023 I started making my own granola. It’s really good and not too difficult, but does take some effort to maintain.
• Maintain my planner + calendar
  Midway through 2024 I committed to a physical planner, which has been really lovely for me.
• Blog
• See friends, visit the Recurse Center
• Code

Monthly:

• Plan for the next month
• See a show
• Deep clean something
• Set goals

I have a couple alterations I’d make to this list today, but for some reason not enough to write them either in this post or on my notebook just yet. Partly since my semester hasn’t started yet, it’s been gratifying to realize that I’ve done a bit better of a job maintaining work on these intentions than I expected.