New year, new resolutions

I made three "official" resolutions this new year, and one unofficial one. The unofficial one affects this blog: I am going to try to make sure that I post something here once a week. I don't want to raise this to the status of an "official" resolution because I don't want to guilt myself into putting up something just for the sake of putting up something; after all, isn't that what an "official" resolution is for? Instead, I am just going to try to make this space a bit more of a place I go to post reflections. Hopefully about once a week, maybe more if it's one of those weeks.

Enough of that. The three "official" resolutions, for those of you who care:

1) pick my guitar back up again. It's been sitting in its case for about four years, gathering dust and getting way way out of tune; the calluses on my fingers, and the finger-strength to hold down the strings to make a clean chord, have faded. I'm currently at "practicing scales" and "trying to contort my fingers sufficiently to make a decent G chord." My goal: be able to play some Christmas carols by next December.

2) go to the gym again. I was doing pretty well there for a while, making it to the local Y about three times a week, but after Thanksgiving that basically fell by the wayside, Until this week, when I've already gone twice and hope to go again tomorrow afternoon. We'll see how well I do at keeping that resolution.

3) take more time to read -- and I don't mean for classes I'm currently teaching or papers I'm currently writing. One of the things I've been horrible at for several years is taking time to read more broadly in social theory, philosophy, and theology -- the kinds of things that interest me and the places from which I draw the inspiration for my work. For a number of reasons my time as gotten rather instrumentalized, and I find myself basically reading as much as I absolutely need to read to accomplish task X or Y, so that I can use my time to get other things done. As a short-term survival strategy for an academic, that makes sense sometimes; as a long-term practice, it's intellectual suicide. So effectively immediately I'm taking back one day a week (Tuesdays, this semester) to read things that are not of direct relevance to current projects, but which form the backdrop of the more general intellectual orientation that I am continually in the process of (re)forging. First up: either Fritz Ringer's new biography of Weber, or perhaps a little William James. We'll see -- I'll keep y'all posted.

[Posted with ecto]