Maria: New Year’s resolutions aren't really my thing. I'm feeling pretty fine about myself and my life most of the time, and I'm not used to waiting until a certain date to change what I don’t like, but if you ask... This year, my New Year’s resolution will be to stubbornly be myself. Eat tasty food, sleep a lot, take care of my loved ones, and admit my mistakes with an undertone of humor: in other words, to stay calm and be happy. Do you want to join me? #NewYearSameOldMe
Maryam: I like the long January holidays because EVERYONE is on holiday and everyone is in a good mood! I can stop and think and just relax. Also, everything is on sale after new years, and we already got our December salaries so my new year’s resolution, every year, is to make a list of what I need and what I really want and go spending. I also use this time to do some “spring cleaning” and make some plans and goals. So basically, I make my new year's resolutions all throughout January.
Nastia: Lord, I hate recycling. I hate it so much I’m surprised the plastic bottles I hoard in the hope that I will one day dispose of them ethically don’t incinerate then and there from the way I look at them. At the same time, having read so much about the horrors of plastic and seen countless news reports about whales found on the shores with their bellies stuffed with plastic bags and other presents of our wonderful civilization, I can’t bring myself to throw things out, and if I do, I feel like a rogue poacher that has just killed the last specimen of a Red List species on Earth. Like a rogue poacher with a conscience, though, a Dostoevsky rogue poacher. Anyways.
I want 2019 to be the year I finally got the recycling malarkey down to a T. I want to force myself to feel excited and elated when I’m washing the pile of plastic containers I need to get rid of as per the rules of the recycling center I frequent, and also when I’m carrying these all the way to the said center through the crowded streets, bracing passers-by’s looks that range from pity (because they must be thinking that I’m a booze-obsessed knight of the road dragging my daily trash-bin haul to exchange it for the three kopecks I need to buy a beverage that shall not be named) to suspicion (because, in all of my recycling zeal, I evidently resemble a kleptomaniac with a special penchant for plastic tsatskes) and fury (because a person with a seen-better-days sack full of plastic bottles is obviously up to no good; what’s next, robbing a bank? seriously, these millennials!). I want to be that person. I don’t know how I can transform myself from a lazy waster that just can’t be bothered to a pepped-up environmentalist with an unbending will, but that’s what resolutions are for, right? Do your magic, Santa, at least for once, it is you and your North Pole abode that will soon turn to a beach resort thanks to the global warming I’m thinking about, for pity's sake.
Anna: My goal is for 2019 to be the year of skyrockets in flight. It will be the year of vision, focus, and drive. I even got the right mug for the job. Because if not now, when?
Nastia: I had never been a fan of New Year’s resolutions. Before last year, when I decided to travel more and wrote down a list of countries and cities I wanted to start with. It worked out even better than I could have imagined, as I’ve managed to exceed my initial target several-fold. So one of my goals for the new year is to make three relatively big trips (to Norway/Sweden, the Czech Republic, and the Curonian Spit), and go on with small weekend trips I got so used to in 2018.
