It’s 2019! The year I get married. Hold me.
Aside from that particular piece of terrifying adulting, there are some other things I’d like to do this year. Some are Magic related, some are general life related. They’re not like, “day two a GP” or “become an epic streamer” because let’s face it, I know my strengths and they are not in grinding.
And yes I know it’s already several days into 2019 but I’ve had sinusitis for all of those days.
Pass my L2 judge exam
I had planned to have this wrapped up before Christmas, but y’know. Life. Now that there are no more PPTQs and organised play and the judge programme are still kind of in the dark and I have no idea what this means for Scotland, my enthusiasm for it has…dwindled, admittedly. But I know I can do it and I’m stubborn, so 2019 will be the year I become part of Scotland’s enviable L2 contingent.
With, as always, a little help from my friends.
Learn to play the drums
I can play the guitar. I can play the bass. I’d like to get better at both, but honestly I’ve ALWAYS wanted to learn to play the drums. After my mother innocently said “well, why don’t you?” I thought this was an excellent point.
So I’m going to horse a load of stuff out of my spare room and buy an electric drum kit. I’m very excited. I’ll probably suck. WHO CARES. It’ll be fun.
Learn Gaelic
Yeah it’s only spoken by something like 1.1% of the population and yeah it’s only really spoken in the really far north and the Isles (unless you’re at a train station, apparently) but I’ve always been fascinated by it. I can speak a little (mostly from Outlander, Runrig songs and a brief two-week attempt to learn while I was at uni) but let’s ACTUALLY do it this year.
Pimp out my Commander deck
I love my dragons deck. It’s half shiny and lives in a treasure chest. It could be shinier though. There’s a bunch of reasonably inexpensive dragon foils to be picked up at GPs or stores. Hopefully by next Christmas it’ll be blingy enough to be worthy of an actual dragon.
Be a better judge
I’m not an awful judge, but there’s always room for improvement. The feedback I get most often is that I need to work on confidence, and it’s fair. I do. I’m a soft skills judge at heart, rather than a ruled-based hard skills one, and I’m pretty decent at the soft skills.
Imagine how good I’d be if I got confident with the hard skills. I KNOW RIGHT.
Just…be better.
Earlier this year, one of my favourite bands lost their lead singer to suicide. I was heartbroken.
Part of the reason I love Frightened Rabbit and Scott Hutchison so much is that they manage to articulate all the feelings that I have that I don’t know how to give voice to without compromising their enormity. This is my favourite of their lines, because it’s something I aspire to every single day. Tiny changes to make even a small corner of the world better for one person.
Judging. Running events for the local community. The badges at GP Liverpool. Everything I do follows this mentality. I like to think I’m even a little bit successful, but there’s always room for improvement. The world is so miserable right now. If we can make it better at all, then we should.
Tiny changes.
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I hope your 2019 is everything you want it to be. And if you only do one thing this year, be more Frightened Rabbit.
Unglued 