Set it up, knock it down

I wrote 124 resolutions for the past year. Here's an annotated list of how they went.

Each December, I write 100 resolutions plus the last two digits of the coming year—so 124 for 2024.

The idea is that you cram it all in: the minute and the massive. In a year, you have so many opportunities. You can be the industrious striver and rapturous shirker; the eagle eye and the heart animal; a conscientious daughter, a more precise friend, and a person whose bathtub you could eat shrimp out of, that’s how clean it is. Not to mention! Going to the beach a lot. Obtaining both professional success and a new stereo system. You try and fail, or don’t. You have many other things to do anyway.

I usually write my ideas for my future in a booklet of stapled-together index cards. These, I pieced together at Superiority Burger, on the train, at a short-lived boyfriend’s Stuy Town kitchen table before he woke up. I wrote them in pencil and pen and motion. Here they are. (I’ve redacted a few salacious and sadsackish ambitions, but, as a journalist Committed to Transparency in Telling on Herself, I’ve said why for each omission.)

Hilariously, what’s missing is the one resolution I most frequently trotted out to explain this annual practice to my friends (incl. my beloved Daniel Saldaña Paris, who wrote his 125 for 2025 here). I wanted so badly to go up in a cherry picker. Not to force it by paying someone—just to have it work out of its own volition. I’d express interest on the street, and the workers, against their union policies, professional judgment, and preferences in re: spending their afternoons on Earth, would say, “It really seems like that should happen for you. Let’s bend the rules this one time!” I can see us now, the three of us against the heaven-blue sky, 20 feet above the sidewalk. Angels in a gift basket signed The Industrial Revolution.

Look, technically… the c-picker wasn’t on the list this year. My 2025 aspirations are already revealing themselves to me. Let me know what you’re thinking for your year, too?

With love,

Amy Rose

1. Stay free | ✔, first on my list every year

2. Volunteer service, in any way, at least once a week | ✔, mostly

3. Write for at least an hour, in any way, five mornings a week | ✔, mostly

4. Remember always that the reader in my head can sometimes be a friend, but is always me | ✔, but not in a good way

5. Do three small tasks each day that beautify my home | ✔, mostly

6. No red wine on my white shag rug!! | ✔, but I got Patrick Ta blush on it

7. Call cabs and order delivery only on special occasions | 𝗫

8. Do six readings/shows | ✔✔✔✔✔✔

Reading about my past career as a nightclub hostess at an October event thrown by the “what if the New York Post were cool and had integrity” news website, Hell Gate. It’s worker-owned, and its reporting is expert and funny. Subscribe! Photo by Nick Williams.

9. Send book proposal before April 31 | 𝗫, in part because April has only 30 days

10. Make lists in my diary at least once a week | ✔, it was closer to three times a week

11. Go to the horse races in Queens | 𝗫

12. Travel to three new-to-me countries | 𝗫𝗫𝗫

13. Make a yearly budget and think of it as a means of real stability | ✔, twice

14. Go to Riis with my friends five times | ✔✔✔✔✔

15. Get bro tattoos with Laia | ✔

Snoopy smoking a cigarette and looking at the moon designed by Erin Jhi and tattooed by Soyoon Sharp. Photo of my back by Hannah La Follette Ryan; photo of Laia by me.

16. Be a present and loving sister, no matter what | ✔, in intention and I hope in fact too

17. Give more birthday gifts | ✔

18. Publish at least one non-SELF essay or article that feels uncompromised and uncompromising | ✔, shoutout to Cake Zine for the opportunity to write about the apocalypse

19. Learn about the moon | ✔, here is how to do the same via a) interactive models put together by the journalist Bartosz Ciechanowski, along with an illustrative and appropriately awed 17,000-word article, and b) the artwork of Anne Craven, who, on her website, writes that she “has been making paintings of the moon, a symbol of time and memory, since 1995 from varying vistas in Maine and her studio rooftop in New York.” I recommend both, and I also recommend learning more about the moon by looking at it and thinking about it. (Perhaps in the mode of Snoopy smoking, above.)

20. Become a better in-person storyteller | ✔, by practicing, made a big difference at readings

21. Let people sweep me off my feet, but not for too long* | ✔, see #75 for details

22. Great sex only | ✔, mostly

23. Write a letter every week | ✔

24. See new-to-me art in person (any medium) at least three times a month | ✔

Darius Carter at an April “Hostile Takeover” match put on by Warriors of Wrestling at Most Precious Blood Church in Gravesend.

25. Floss so much | ✔

26. Visit John and Alex in LA | ✔

27. Go to New Orleans by train | 𝗫

28. Quit smoking and use money to fund travel (...or a Prada bag, or both) | 𝗫

29. Finish website redesign with Tadashi | ✔

30. Deliberately locate ease and joy in editing as I start each workday | ✔, largely

31. Get bookshelves for my diary and arrange chronologically | ✔

32. Get ID that isn’t my passport | ✔, though I’m surprised to find I’m scowling the same “felon who just ate a pastrami sandwich” as I did when Hermione and I got my passport renewed in 2017. I never look identical to myself in photos

33. See a financial adviser | ✔

34. Potentially tweak investments | ✔

35. Write a poem on the first of every month | ✔, including a sestina in November!

36. Open my frequencies to the outside world every morning—then keep them that way | sometimes ✔, sometimes 𝗫

37. Welcome and embrace ritual | ✔

38. Keep an eye out for the divine | ✔

My mother and Ray reading from the binder of centuries-old Persian poetry he keeps under the counter at his candy store in the East Village. Ray will turn 92 on New Year’s Day!

39. Read Moravia’s Boredom | ✔

40. Read more Silvia Federici | ✔

41. Find five new heroes/lodestars, ask your friends and strangers for clues | ✔

42. Go to France with Mitch | 𝗫

43. Working room by room: Ensure everything in your house has a place | ✔ for roughly the first half of the year. Now I have, for instance, some Playboy trading cards and old political newspapers that my mind refuses to wrap itself around placing? Whatever

44. Go to Fire Island for at least two weeks—once with the Old Guard, once with newcomers | ✔✔

45. Sell all precious metals and invest the profits—ask Mitchy for his Diamond District guy | 𝗫

46. [Redacted because it’s about food, I’m a woman, and I know the drill—nothing good comes of being frank about this] | 𝗫

47. [Redacted: see above] | 𝗫

48. Vacuum everything once a week | ✔

49. Make a little daily schedule | ✔, a lot of the time

50. Tape it next to the front door when you’re feeling especially shiftless | 𝗫

51. Frame loose art | ✔

52. Have it on the walls by my housewarming | ✔

53. Take external relationships slower if I need to make my book go faster | ✔, but still spent the summer partying in the unrelenting glory of my friends

54. Keep non-book-dedicated notebook with me for empirical detail | 𝗫, honestly, not really

55. Take better care of nails | ✔

For me, this just means getting acrylics. It’s a little thing called Mental Health… Photo by Chrissy Rhee at SB.

56. Keep in mind: You’re already doing it | neither ✔ nor 𝗫, but a self-referential stutter near the halfway mark—this is allowed

57. Close frequencies to annoying coworkers | ✔

58. Get a real wallet…! | ✔, Nick got me one for my birthday, just under the wire

59. [Redacted for oversimplification—my shorthand makes sense to me on paper, but bears more explication here. This one was about a) putting as much energy I could toward the people whose lives have been made hell by Israel’s genocide in Gaza and b) doing that by way of reliable reporting about it, including through journalists on the ground like Hind Khoudary, the firsthand-source-centric gazette The New York War Crimes, and the daily morning show from Democracy Now. On December 27—three days ago—Israel killed five Palestinian journalists. At least 133 other journalists have died since October 7, though that count is surely low. This is not an accident: In this, the atrocity of our lifetime, we don’t know the fullest picture of the thousands upon thousands of people who have been killed by Israel’s ethnic cleansing effort. Part of that is the result of the lethal silencing of reporters. Because Israel knows its conduct is disgraceful and genocidal, it conceals it through the murder of those able to witness and communicate it. In 2024, my friend Thora Siemsen has organized about $60,000 in donations to HEAL Palestine and the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Those are good places to put $2, or $5 or $20 or $100, whenever it occurs to you that you have it.]

60. [Redacted because it’s about making zines, and for whatever reason I don’t want to cop to my thinking there] | 𝗫

61. Get a big plank of wood to stretch across my bathtub and hold candles, flowers, books | 𝗫

62. Get a stereo system that thrills you (if not your neighbors) | ✔, they are DJs and don’t mind

63. Tailor generosity specifically to its recipients if possible | ✔, usually

64. When you feel stuck, pull and annotate studies that might help the book | ✔

65. Soon: Make a visual style guide for the book, for kicks | 𝗫

66. Go surfing at least five times, ideally once with Katie | 𝗫

67. Fix camera and take pictures like Grandpa | 𝗫

68. Get back into Hall Street volunteer efforts by February | ✔

69. Look into mastery of boring but helpful things like buying household needs in bulk | ✔

70. Learn to make the fudge you had in Corfu | 𝗫, but I made a friend at a bakery in Astoria and she happened to give me some!!!

71. Be there for X steadfastly—surprise her | ✔

72. Only wear clothing I feel great in | 𝗫

Not exclusively, but often enough.

73. Write a song with big production elements | 𝗫

74. Say less, be generously private | ✔

75. Addendum to #21: Fall in love if you want! (Those last three words are the key here.) | ✔, when I met a person who made me want to

76. Make clothing for friends | ✔

77. Have hard limits around phone use | ✔

78. Even so: Faithfully respond to text messages, just on your own time | ✔

79. Decide at least 50% of the way about whether you want to have children | 𝗫

80. Chisel open the painted-closed shutters in your office | 𝗫

81. Do the New York City Ballet exercise from 2000 once a week | 𝗫, I did very often but not at this cadence—sometimes three times a week, sometimes zero

82. Have sex in a new-to-me place | ✔, and how!

83. Say YES whenever you are offered travel | 𝗫

84. Get fitted for a suit | 𝗫

85. Get a facial | ✔, ✔

86. [Redacted, suppurating earnestness] | ✔

87. [Redacted, ibid.] | ✔

88. Get better at numbers | ✔, I’ve got to hand this to me. Look at the sequential perfection in play before your very eyes…

89. Become a regular at Superiority Burger | ✔, they sent me an Instagram DM on January 21 that began, “Hi Amy! So fun you are a regular at SB.”

With John in February; with Brooks in August, photo by Tom Kretchmar. Unquantifiably many other photos of “The Restaurant” throughout this year. (At least one more appears in this list.)

90. Paint my masterpiece | neither ✔ nor 𝗫

91. Go toward the feeling of, “Did you know that when you wrote it?” | ✔

92. Gild the kingdom of my brain | ✔ and 𝗫

93. [Redacted, self-esteem] | ✔

94. Go to Arthur Avenue | 𝗫

95. Get [redacted, sex act] on the Staten Island Ferry | 𝗫

96. Make Survivor audition tape | 𝗫, but I swear 2025 is my year

97. Collage notebooks to remind me of and reinforce my attraction | ✔

98. [Redacted, New York City politics] | 𝗫

99. Help Jenna with her garden | ✔

100. Get sleeping arrangements for guest room together | ✔

101. Clothing donation once a season | ✔✔✔✔

102. Twice-annual stoop sales with Jenna | ✔✔

103. Keep plants alive | ✔, the important ones anyway

104. Meet a new romantic friend for keeps | ✔, majorly. A brief clarification: “Romantic friendship” is what I call a twinship of the heart with someone I’m not dating, but linked to through a significant, subcutaneous feeling

105. Do something weird on a boat, ideally wearing a captain’s hat | ✔

On a water taxi with Katie. You can sense that our Souls are wearing captains’ hats here

106. Replace library card | ✔

107. Throw a party in honor of a friend’s achievement | ✔

108. Low-stakes heist | ✔

109. Make out like it’s my day job | ✔

110. Carry cash for people who could use it | ✔

111. Dream up a few interesting public health features for SELF | ✔

112. Buy ice cube trays | ✔

113. Take mushrooms and go to the Sunken Forest | ✔

G. was holding my arm, so happy. He said, “I don’t know how my brain could hold more beauty.” I hugged him and looked over his shoulder as these three confident fox kits emerged out of the brush, and I got to say, “Okay, turn around.” June.

114. Be more mysterious | ✔

115. Put sunscreen on my hands daily | 𝗫, but generally got better about it

116. Find a pleasant way to satisfy the urge to DESTROY!! | ✔

117. Finish the lyrics for “The Wanting Machine” | ✔

118. Eat at [redacted, striving] | 𝗫

119. Make opportunities to spend time with Grandma | ✔

With my brother, Charlie, in Cedar Grove in March.

120. Be patient with X | ✔

121. [Redacted, heartfelt] | ✔

122. Allow yourself to be kept company | ✔

123. Draw some cartoons | ✔

124. Remember always: You’ve got options | ✔