By Carter James, Editor in chief  

The ball drops and now everyone believes they’ve been given a reset button on life.  

I too woke up later that day on Jan.1 imbued with a new sense of purpose, but nothing significant has changed. I’m still the same person I was on Dec. 31 and I’ll still be that same person even as I grow and change.  

What I intend to change is how I go about my life.  

If college has taught me something, it’s very easy to fall into a cycle of bad habits when you find yourself getting away with them. No matter how much I succeed, gambling with my time is still gambling. No amount of last-minute blitzes, all nighters, cram sessions, extensions and assignments turned in late can take away from the fact that I will still graduate, and the safety net will be gone. 

Maybe this is just the cries of a regretful senior who’s trying to make sense of poor time management, but there is no time to change like the present.  

The biggest thing we all must realize about ourselves is that change does not happen overnight. Mindset alone will not drive results. Trial and error will.  

We all want the perfect body, our weekly assignments done on the first day and multiple hobbies that make us seem eclectic. But that perfect version of ourselves is the one that is content in not being who we want to be yet.  

Where does that leave us? The problems don’t go away immediately, and the character development takes a whole season instead of an arc. Realizing that every day must be lived with purpose.  

Those thousands of problems and aspirations won’t work themselves out. Pick one and get it done.  Your room is messy, a significant assignment is coming up, a campus org is being neglected. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and no one is asking you to solve every problem right now.  

Every problem comes from a bad habit. Like dominoes, it always starts with one small thing. A major flaw of mine has been forgetfulness. To combat it, I’ve started using my notes app with more purpose.  

An important thing that needs to be done as soon as possible makes its way into a daily to do list. Key information that will be helpful for the feature becomes digital shorthand in a dedicated note surrounding a topic. The spark of an idea is captured in a document about a project I’ve thought about for months.  I already have a phone addiction, so I might as well get addicted to my notes app too.  

The constant battle in my mind is how to reengage with my passions. The things I once loved have become afterthoughts. A rarity that still consumes my every waking thought but rarely my waking actions.  I realized I had to rewire my brain. 

A challenge; a set of rules to live by for an extended period of time. Imagine the concept of a 75 hard, but for movie watching.  

For the past 22 (hopefully 26 when you read this) days, I’ve watched a new movie every day. Ranging from classics, arthouse staples, underseen gems and the latest theatrical releases, I’m deep in a cinematic flow state.  

By keeping a watchlist, accompanying Letterboxd reviews, and weekly requirements, this challenge has helped me explore parts of cinema I had been neglecting before.  

A major series of blind spots, films from Studio Ghibli, have been a weekly quest for me. If I’m going to watch movies for 75 days, I might as well watch the films I know I’ve been missing out on for years.  

Films directed by women and more specifically women of color have been out of the film “cannon” for decades. By exploring outside of the lists of bests or “essential films” I’ve found new favorites.  

Dee Ree’s “Pariah” is arguably the best film I’ve seen this year. It’s an independent, coming of age drama from 2011 about a teenage black girl whose family life starts to deteriorate as her sexuality comes into question from her parents. While I don’t directly relate to this story, I deeply felt this idea of feeling unsafe to be yourself in front of those who should understand you the most. 

I don’t expect to have my life together by the time I walk across the stage in May. What I will do until then is live every day purposely. Just because our old problems follow us into the new year doesn’t mean we can’t find a meaningful way to change.