It’s a Monday night, and I’m just working on a few things around the house. Dinner is in the oven and before I go to sleep, I’m going to take my very excitable husky, Keino, out for a walk in the rain, finish the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen, make a plan for tomorrow, and rewrite (again…) a few of my essays on my grad school apps. It’s not that my first essays weren’t good, but I keep thinking of better angles and more honest things to write about. Work went okay but was a little stressful. Normally I would be nursing a good IPA right about now and enjoying the fact that at the moment life isn’t a complete shit storm. Everything is getting done, so what’s the harm in that?
Why now? Why not after that next party on the calendar? Why not a New Years Resolution, or after the holiday season coming up where I’ll get invited to about 3 parties each to Halloween, Christmas, New Years, and Oktoberfest? It’s important to know you’re “why”, and it’s important for me to start things right away. So this post is dedicated to my reasons why.
- Because I’m strapped for cash.
Okay, so that’s only kind of true. I did the math and this calendar year, I have spent roughly $650 on alcohol, which equates to almost $1000 if I kept spending at that pace for the rest of the year. That’s a full mortgage payment. And this has been a dry year. To be fair, a good piece of that amount was spent on a few long days/nights at the bars. I don’t necessarily regret those nights, but they don’t hold any place in my life going forward. With luck, I’ll be starting PT school in the spring/summer and won’t be able to work nearly as much, and will need to scrape everything I can together to pay off the house before the program starts. I also have other plans for my money that alcohol keeps siphoning away. Every dollar has a job, and beer money isn’t doing its job.
2. Because I’m tired of feeling like shit.
After the last several boozy nights I have woken up with a hangover and the feeling of disappointment, and spent half the day trying to feel normal again. I look in the mirror and at pictures from the night before at my glassy eyes and plastered over face and I don’t feel good about who I am at those times. And that’s before I check my credit card statement. I’m tired of skipping a work out in the evening because I’m lethargic from those beers I had at lunch. I’m done wasting away weekend nights that I could spend working toward something awesome and lasting, or just appreciating the night. I’m done feeling like I need to pick up a 6-pack every time I want to drop by a friend’s house.
3. My Time is Worth More Than That
This is the most important point to me. I have written down all of my goals and personal projects that I want to work on in my free time, and to be fair I do spend a decent amount of time doin those things. But the fact of the matter is that I don’t have THAT much free time through the week, and if I am drunk all weekend then that accounts for most of my time. And I have a lot of things that I am passionate about and I would enjoy my life more if I spent my valuable time doing those things:
- Fix the damn leak in the ceiling (ugh there’s a leak in the damn ceiling).
- Master BJJ. I loveee practicing jiu jitsu and being surrounded by people with a warrior’s mentality. It makes me feel alive. But it’s not just BJJ. I just love the process of training for things and mastering them. There’s beauty in taking advantage of your potential. Like, most people look at something they’ve never done before and think “oh I wouldn’t be good at that thing”. Because they haven’t taken the time to train and learn. I like to find things I don’t know how to do, and master them. Usually that’s what I do when I work on my car or fix things around the house.
- Get in killer running and physical shape. I used to consider myself a good runner, but have for the past few years called myself “retired”. I usually chalk it up to frequent knee injuries (which, fair enough) and that I’m usually working anymore (which, fair again), but there’s no reason why I had to go from competitive runner to couch potato.
- Spend time with friends in a meaningful way. Like doing new things. Getting hammered isn’t a new experience.
- See my family more. It’s hard to make the trip from Cincinnati to Springfield when you’re drunk.
- Spend more time volunteering at the fire house. This is something that I really enjoy doing but frequently gets placed in the “if I had more time” bin.
- Make some extra cash at night. Again, to pay off the house in prep for grad school. I used to bartend some and could start doing that again. I don’t want my ENTIRE life to turn into work, and I have a tendency to let it do that, but taking care of that seems important.
- Take my dating life seriously for once. LOL
- Go kayaking on the river.
- Take Keino on more walks. He gets lots of walks. I just think he deserves more walks.
- Be involved in the community. Loveland has a LOT of ways to get involved and is REALLY happening for a town its size.
- Travel more. I have a lot of plans for places I want to go (like everybody does).
So obviouslyyy there’s no shortage of things to replace booze with. I rearranged my social calendar so that I won’t run into any serious temptations early in the game. That was actually hard for me to do. I live alone (well, not really ALONE if I have a dog, right?) and don’t socialize THAT much through the week except for the firehouse and the Gracie gym, which don’t count as socializing in my book. I omitted a housewarming party that I was looking forward to and decided not to go with friends to the Renaissance Fair this year, even though last year it was a ton of fun. Instead of those things, I’m visiting my family in Springfield one weekend and still need to make plans for the other. The only weekend that I am going to be in a party setting is at the end of this month I’m running a Ragnar race in Michigan with some old high school friends and some of their friends, and we had planned on partying in Kalamazoo after. Which I’m still going to go do, but it will be my first party not drinking in, I don’t know, 10 years? I’m pretty sure I’ll be alright though.
Iron Sharpens Iron 