#21: Blog about Thirty By Thirty

Despite the fact that it's only 15 degrees outside, I am actually perspiring a little when I leave the kitchen. 

I've been making pizzas for about an hour and a half, and now that all my guests have been sated, I flop down on floor with a very large glass of wine. 

My best friend is scribbling something on a lined sheet of paper. My other friends are laughing over something she's said and I tap her on the knee and indicate that I want to see what she's working on. 

"Well, you know my birthday was yesterday?" She says before handing me the sheet of paper.

"Yup, birthday brunch tomorrow."

"Well, I'm making my thirty by thirty list." 

I start reading it and crack up. After fifteen years of friendship (at this point in our lives we've been friends for longer than we haven't) I could probably have written most of this list. I hand it back to her and pick up the thread of the conversation and lose myself in the course of the evening, laughing so hard I nearly spit out my wine a few times. After a ridiculous amount good-natured teasing (apparently my spinsterhood will involve not cats, but lynx named Gertrude, Gloria, and Tina--major points if you can guess why they're named that) I kick everyone out of the house and collapse gratefully into my bed.

The next day I head over to my running partner's house to do the most Minnesotan thing I can think of--we're heading to the U.S. Pond Hockey Tournament. As I'm pulling on all of my warm clothes, I catch sight of a lined piece of paper on the table. 

"What are you working on?"

"Well, Michelle really got me thinking about this Thirty by Thirty thing and I've got a little less than a year, but I figured I might as well give it a shot." He pauses. "I would have thought with your love of lists you would have sat down last night after we all left and made one."

***

Here are my dirty secrets. 

Despite making New Year's Resolutions every year, I think that there's only one resolution worth having. At the end of the year you should be a better person than you were the year before. 

That's it. That's the basis of all of my resolutions. 

Here's the second.

I have an absolute, fanatical, borderline religious belief in the power of quantitative data. 

I spend a not insignificant amount of time looking at 2010 Census Quickfacts for the various places I've lived in. I geek out when I get an annual report from a nonprofit I support. I track the hits on my blog, measure what kinds of entries people seem to like.

That's just the tip of the iceberg.

I wear a Fitbit for Christ's sake. I track the number of hours I sleep, the number of steps I take, the minutes I exercise, and the calories I net during the course of the day. I keep lists of the books that I read, how the medications I'm taking impact my mood, and whether or not I feel more positive with more or less caffeine or processed food, or whatever.

Look, I realize how nutty and OCD this sounds, but the truth is that I believe (absolutely, fanatically, religiously) that with the right data, I can forcibly make myself a better person.

***

On Sunday morning I sat down and wrote my Thirty by Thirty list. 

It breaks down into a few broad categories--areas I know (from my obsessive data collection) need work. Those areas are: skill acquisition, financial & physical health, interpersonal relationships, and artistic/cultural growth. After I finished it, I considered posting it here, in this entry. Then I realized that it would be more interesting and a better approach to the list would be to write about the things as they're crossed out. Some of you already know all of them. Some know some. Most of you could probably guess at least half the list. 

It might be a little bigger or a more grandiose list if I had written it more than eight months out from my 30th. That's all right. The things that are on the list are things that matter to me and are actually achievable over the coming months. More than that, they're things that I feel like I'll be able to look back on in nine months and measure. In late September I'll be able to look back on the list, on the things that I've crossed off of it, and be able to say whether or not I'm starting my 30s as a better person than I was in my 20s. It is, I suppose, the last last grand experiment in a whole string of experiments of my early adulthood. Except this time I'm bothering to measure it. 

I can't wait.