2020 Resolutions

We’re here on the second of January and I wanted to post my resolutions for 2020 for all the world to see in an effort towards accountability through visibility. I’ve been spending some time thinking about my goals for this year and what all I want to get done this year, so since one of them is to write more blog posts, I figured I’d start here.

Become fully fluent in Spanish

I spent the last year getting to the point where I can speak Spanish enough to have real meaningful conversations with people. I speak to my roommate only in Spanish, and I can finally make jokes and show a bit more of my personality in Spanish (which is a big milestone!). However, I still struggle if I’m in a group of native speakers and they’re all speaking rapidly, and I still generally need to use Spanish subtitles if I’m watching a movie or TV show in Spanish. The goal for 2020 is to get to full fluency — I’ll have more blog posts to come on my strategies for trying to make that happen.

Learn to dance salsa

One thing that has surprised me about Mexican culture is how prevalent salsa dancing it is — it’s not uncommon at all for salsa dancing to break out at any given party, and for … basically every non-foreigner to know how to dance and be on the floor dancing. While I love to dance to hip-hop and reggaeton, salsa is a whole different animal. My goal here is to get to the point where I can dance with a stranger and not absolutely embarrass myself. I expect I’ll both need some formal lessons and to spend a fair amount more time in salsa clubs to get there.

Read a lot of books

According to goodreads I read 31 books in 2019 (though I didn’t finish all of those), and I have an even more ambitious list slated for 2020 — 34 books in total, which isn’t too out of the ordinary for me, but this year about half of them will be in Spanish. This will be a pretty heavy load, but if I want to meet goal #1 I think it’ll be necessary. Expect many book reviews to be forthcoming!

Write more blog posts

Finally, I want to be more diligent about writing blog posts. My goal (for now) is at least one per week — this should be easily achievable with my schedule, and my hope is that after I build up the writing muscle a bit more I can increase the frequency even more.

Happy New Year to all of my friends, and here’s to many more blog posts in 2020!