Good Things Friday (145) and Link Love
December 3, 2021
1. Korean food has been a real revelation to me in adulthood. Ban chan, not to be confused with Bon Chon (the Korean fried chicken which is also great), soondobu / tofu soup, jap chae, bulgogi, bibimbap, it’s all so good.
2. I’ve been annoyed with my mouse for AGES and I finally replaced it. A mouse that responds at the speed I want it to! AMAZING!
Challenges this week: Work has been extra overwhelming and it’s taken extra efforts to take steps back to recalibrate, and not to work until midnight each night.
Grieving our losses from this year has been creeping in at odd times, striking me when I don’t expect it, and sometimes it’s crippling. It passes but it’s going to take some time to really absorb all the losses.
Story Five: The time I cooked dinner for 25 people with a broken oven.
My Heartbreaking, and Unquestionably Right, Late-Term Abortion
I’ve been moving away from annual goals in recent years. Thinking of good goals that I’d be happy to live with all year is too much pressure for the last month of the year (since I like to mull them over for a couple weeks before committing, this has to happen before Christmas!) I like OFG’s New Month, New Goals: Building on Incremental Success, it reminds me I can choose to set goals any which way that works best for me. I might try quarterly. I might try monthly after January. Maybe a combo! What kind of goal setting do you like?
Rats Show Empathy, Too (my mental subtitle: rats, they’re better than people)
This shark tracker is neat but also terrifying with the current (Thursday night) masses of sharks on the East Coast.
There aren’t any KFC near me, so BonChon is my default when I’m in a fried chicken-y sort of mood. Also pickled radishes! Nom.
Bon Chon is VASTLY superior to KFC! And precisely because of the pickled radish 😁 but also because they do chicken better.
oooh I rarely get Korean food and when I do I usually stick to bibimbap since it’s SO good. I’ll try to branch out next time but no promises 🙂
I don’t set annual goals anymore. I don’t set very many goals at all, now that I think about it.
Fitness activity seems the most measurable and can be in short-term increments, but I prefer being lazy! When I turned x this summer I set a goal to run that many miles in the 2 months before my bday. That was doable in one- and two-mile increments and I accomplished it and promptly stopped running. I’ll probably do a month-long goal in January just since it’s symbolic to me to start the year off with something, and a friend is going to be doing a semi-formal encouragement program. I’m slow and heavy and out of shape and don’t really like running (though I do like having completed a run), so the goal will be something like run x times per week, not any amount of distance or speed or duration. Gotta keep those goals somewhat easy to attain, and running is the lowest barrier in terms of equipment and time required. I absolutely don’t do gyms.
I’m saving up a pot of money for a specific thing that happens mid next year, but that’s almost on auto pilot, I haven’t set any stretch goals for it, just funnel a specific amount over every payday.
I don’t need to set reading goals because books are my primary way to spend my alone time.
What other types of goals are there? I think I’ll spend time thinking about other that.
You know what you need? A food buddy! That way you can get your standby dish AND try a new one without too much commitment. I strongly recommend this strategy!
I think I like money goals because it feels good to feel like I intentionally managed to do something but also because I like money and having it. (Who would have guessed??)
I like figuring out what kinds of goals work well with your time of life and personality.
I like your X times a week running goal. I might do something similar where I’m trying to leave the house more than Y times a week (Y being 0 on a bad week) for an actual walk. Distance and speed do not matter, the actual getting out for however long I can manage is the key.
I also don’t set reading goals, I don’t need a goal post for that since I would read all day if I could get away with it.
I don’t know that there are many other goals I’m in the mood for. Maybe when things are less ALL THIS, I’ll want to do something more but I’m good with a money one, and getting out of the house for now. Oh and maybe learning to sew a straight seam by sometime next year! That’d be cool.
I like doing “fractal” goals myself: I have big/long-term goals that I set at the beginning of the year (both academic and calendar years), smaller ones for each month, also each week, and then (in theory) every morning. So OFG’s post resonates with me; I can see how that would be a useful approach.
G’luck with all the overwhelmingness of work. I’m trying to tell my head that “overwhelmed” isn’t the mental attitude to have to my own work, but I don’t know that my head believes me right now; at any rate, I’m playing email catch-up all weekend.
There’s something about that fractal approach that makes me feel like life is more manageable. But then I think that’s why I live by to do lists, which are set up sort of the same way as your goals.
Thank you and likewise! I try to adjust my attitude but I have to confess when I can’t manage it so that I don’t spin around in a mental spiral of doom. Admitting when it’s not working helps jolt me out of the funks.
I appreciate the goal-setting comments on this post. I’m now in my forties, and setting small goals seems like a wiser approach to goal setting because I can bite off tiny chunks at a time. As a whole, I feel a lot less guilty when I fail to achieve a goal I set. I was much more frustrated by lack of progress in my youth. Now I recognize that life is not linear, and we hit bumps along our paths. Thank you for sharing my post.
You’re welcome!
Interesting, Korean food is one of the cuisines I have just never been into! There is a new Korean chicken place nearby though and I do like the fried chicken 😀
Fair! I don’t love all cuisines, but am happy for the ones I do meet and fall for. 🙂