2018 Year in Review

Looking back, I'm actively trying to decide if 2018 was a good year for me. Because I'm constantly setting goals (daily, weekly, summer, yearly, etc.), checking my goal progress is a great way to gauge to what degree I achieved what I set out to this year. Of course, I accomplished or experienced a lot of things that I didn't especially set out to do this year as well and a lot of those experiences were incredibly fulfilling. In short, here's here's a list of some things I did this year:

• Got a job as a substitute teacher, tutor, and eventually a full-time high school math teacher. Working as a high school math teacher has been my dream for about 6 years now and I'm really glad I was finally able to get to this point. Also in tutoring, I learned everything there is to possibly know about taking the ACT and getting kids ready to take it.

• Ran my first marathon since my December 2016 ACL reconstruction. This is a big deal to me. Besides the ACL repair about 2 years ago, they also took out a majority of my medial meniscus in my right knee, which means the cushioning and shock absorption in my right knee will be hindered for the rest of my life. On average, full ACL surgery recovery and strengthening can take about 24 months. I started training for a marathon around 18 months post-surgery. I was really happy to be able to run a marathon again and not have my knee prevent me from doing it. In fact, my left knee was the sore one at the end of the day, which is interesting.

Top of Utah Marathon (September 2018)

• Became a cross country and girl's basketball coach. Quite honestly, I hardly felt qualified to coach high school athletes in something I'd never coached or even experienced as an athlete before, but here I am. With no advice or training or assistant coaches, I just started showing up to cross country practice one day in the summer and pretended like I knew what I was doing. Boy, did I learn a LOT this year about these sports, about myself, and about my kids from my experience coaching. Coaching also took up an insane amount of my free time, for what it's worth, but I was happy to have the experience.

Cross country team in Moab, UT (September 2018)

• Started this blog for real. It existed before this year, but 2018 is where I really got it on track to be a good medium for me to express myself in writing. Honestly, I don't post on it a ton--most weeks of teaching, I feel like I hardly have time to write save for a weekend or when we're on break from school. But the writing I have had time to do has been really fulfilling.

• Travelled to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana for the first time. New Orleans is an incredibly fascinating and unique city (to say the least), Gettysburg is a inspiring place, and I learned the people in New Jersey on average just aren't very attractive. But seeing Streetlight Manifesto play in their hometown of Toms River, NJ in front of a huge crowd was a ton of fun.  I also managed to find my way to an Aquabats concert in LA, Arches National Park in southern Utah, the Pac-12 Championship in San Francisco, and the Holiday Bowl in San Diego to watch the Utes play.

As you can see, I was very excited to see the Liberty Bell in person (May 2018)

• Received my diploma and walked at graduation. It's nice for it to finally be official and to finally have the diploma in my hands--I got a Bachelor's degree in mathematics with a minor in physics. It's pretty official now, or whatever, as you can see from my sister's snapchat below.

Diploma day (May 2018)

• Bought my first car, outright and on my own. It's a crappy 1997 Jeep Grand Cherokee, but it runs. I can't remember exactly how the conversation went, but my sister and I decided to name it "The Burgermobile" despite it not even somewhat resembling a sandwich. I also moved out of my parents house for the first time since 2015, for what it's worth, since I guess that's what adults do these days.

• A few things I didn't set out to do but ended up happening: I got really good at Rocket League, watched a lot of Trailer Park Boys, played a lot of Pokemon Go (including finally finishing off my original 150 Pokedex), went to the arcade with friends like 20 times, practiced skateboarding and learned to ollie consistently while riding on pavement, and participated in two 24-hour gaming parties. One of them was a charity event organized by my cousin and we managed to raise a decent amount of money to donate to some sort of mental health organization I can't remember (I was there for the video games, okay???).

• Went on an awesome 9-day Disney World/Universal Studios trip in Florida with my siblings and shot a fun travel video.

The fam in front of the Tree of Life inside Animal Kingdom (March 2018)

• Went Skydiving! It took some trickery to get all my friends there at the same time and I had to plan the trip way out to Tooele for us all since nobody else would do it, but it was worth it. And the actual experience of jumping out of a plane itself? It was nuts--and really hard to put into words. Maybe I'll write about it sometime.

Skydiving with the crew (August 2018)

• Kept up yearly traditions with my friends including St. Patrick's Day, Tanksgiving, Summer goals, the dart board game, and a fantasy football banquet. In thinking about it, my friends and I actually have quite a few yearly traditions and we really did do a good job keeping them up this year. In addition, I also had a great birthday involving just a game of baseball with my friends and family--which became one of my favorite birthday memories to date.

Birthday Baseball game with family and friends. I didn't even strike out! (September 2018)

• Started a mediocre podcast with my best friend Dakota. I think a handful of people actually enjoyed listening to it, but more than anything, we had a ton of fun making it. We really love talking about ourselves and answering questions, as it turns out.

All those things considered, I think I'd call 2018 eventful if not successful. Overall I'd give it a 4/5 stars

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But now looking forward instead, I think it's time to start thinking of what kinds of things I expect to accomplish in 2019. Here's my brainstorming list, though I'm sure the year won't go exactly as I planned:

1.  I've got a life goal to teach abroad sometime. At this young age and early in my career, now would be a great time to start looking into that. If nothing else, I expect to travel out of the country for the first time this upcoming year.
2. Travel to a new state. 31 down, 19 to go!
3. I need to read more books. I honestly love reading, but rarely feel like I have the time.
4. Cut back on all social media and go outside more. Consider getting rid of my smartphone altogether.
5. Practice/learn guitar.
6. Write/start writing a book.
7. Shift weight training and distance running training to instead focus on triathlon training.
8. Run across the state of Utah. By my estimate, this should take about 60 days to complete.

There's so many things I want to do and a year is so little time to do it. There's certainly more I'd like to accomplish in a year, but what with sleeping 8 hours a day and working 40+ hours a week and all the other hobbies I pursue, these 8 things are a pretty reasonable set of self improvements to focus on. Like, reading a book a month is so easy. But reading a book a month when you're training for a marathon, working overtime, keeping up a writing blog, and coaching girls basketball for 2 hours a day while learning the guitar and balancing a dating life plus trying to find time for yourself to relax? That's the real reason why I'm pretty content with the progress I made in 2018. I feel like I worked incredibly hard consistently every single month of the year and I was always pursuing some sort of improvement every day. It wasn't perfect, but if I keep improving like I did in 2018, I think I'll continue to be happy.