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This year i will be greatly expanding my creative and scholarly works and attempting to push the limits of my mind and being. 2013 proved to be an excellent year for my seeds of productivity to take root. I have grown exponentially into myself, and am ready for that to extend beyond myself and into the world. This year will be a grand experiment of the limits of my will to learn, grow, and create, and it is my intention to document through written word and video alike the developments and progressions as they come.

I will be attempting to every day meditate, exercise, and to once again sleep polyphasically (I’ll be starting with an Everyman cycle with 4.5 hr core nap and two 20-min power naps). In addition to these general lifestyle changes my intended to-do list is pretty extensive.

I hope to:

-Record an album of my own solo-music

-Record an album with my old band Nightwalk

-To finish the final 40+ credits i need for my BA through self-study alone and to take the GRE

-To write an ebook on language learning

-To organize all of my writings over the years in such a way that i can begin to compile books and more developed theses to pursue research of

-To learn how to cook fairly well a wide variety of American and international foods

-To get my Spanish, French, Esperanto, German, and Arabic up to C1-level in the European Framework of Reference for Languages or 4 in the FBI Language Proficiency Scale (in other words, functionally fluent, though not to mastery); To become conversationally capable (B2 in CEFR; 2+ in FBI) in Tibetan, Portuguese, Tagalog, and Ojibwe; And to become at least slightly less so conversational (B1 and 2 respectively) in Quechua, Aymara, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, and Sranantongo.

-Travel to the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) to study the Qur’an, Arabic calligraphy, cooking, music, and culture while visiting with my family;

-Travel to the Philippines to visit an old childhood friend of mine and to learn Tagalog;

-While visiting my family’s cottage in Canada to spend time on the nearby Ojibwe Island reserve and learn about their culture and language extensively;

-To travel with my best friend to his home country of Colombia, and to then travel through the continent of South America through hostels and couchsurfing, paying particular emphasis on spending time with indigenous cultures (especially Quechua and Aymara, with the hope of helping to preserve their culture), and paying our way through busking, internet entrepreneurship, and odds-and-ends jobs for extra cash, food, lodging, and travel.

-To document and record in some detail through video and written word my travels, music, and studies throughout the year, in order to track my progress for myself and to inspire others.

Perhaps a tad ambitious, but i firmly believe in the awesome capacity of the human mind. If i achieve a fraction of these, it will be a most successful year.

If you wish to support these endeavors of mine, please subscribe and check in regularly to learn of my progress. Soon i’ll be posting a trevolta (croud-funding travel site) link for the trip to the Philippines and in May i’ll be posting the trevolta for my South America trip.

Thank you for your support and readership!

-J. Ibrahim Abuhamada